Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Loch Ness monster of the knee?

"Historically a wastebasket term for pain and dysfunction … patellofemoral syndrome is not a diagnosis but rather an admission of ignorance"

"The patellofemoral syndrome remains the Loch Ness monster of the knee"

"the black hole of orthopedics"

Snippets from my recent review of the medical literature on my knee diagnosis. Sounds kind of scary, doesn't it? Since I have a known cause of my knee pain (impact injury, cartilage damage), these comments don't technically apply to my case (referring instead to patients who don't have a known cause for the pain, at least in the context of the articles I am quoting). But they do capture my current state of mind about my officially superslow (non)recovery.

Update
Wow, if I had only known! "Diagnosis"? Not really-- PFS is just a catch-all diagnosis for "nonspecific knee pain, doc doesn't know WTF is causing it". "Know cause"? Kind of, in that I knew I had a bad impact injury. But it would take 9+ months to finally sort out what was going on after my crash. "MRI results"? Turned out to be misleading. Watch out for poor quality MRIs and be aware that some stuff is hard to catch (eg my partial meniscus tear) But see above on poor quality MRI. Insight and wisdom from this experience? Plenty, in the hindsight is golden sense. Words of wisdom: go to Stanford Sports Medicine as your first stop (sigh). Hope for the future: plenty, as I continue to slowly recover. I continue to dream that I'll be fully back to it all.